OpenRadio: A Programmable Wireless Dataplane

The authors present OpenRadio, a novel design for a programmable wireless dataplane that provides modular and declarative programming interfaces across the entire wireless stack. Their key conceptual contribution is a principled refactoring of wireless protocols into processing and decision planes. The processing plane includes directed graphs of algorithmic actions (e.g., 54Mbps OFDM Wi-Fi or special encoding for video). The decision plane contains the logic which dictates which directed graph is used for a particular packet (e.g., picking between data and video graphs). The decoupling provides a declarative interface to program the platform while hiding all underlying complexity of execution. An operator only expresses decision plane rules and corresponding processing plane action graphs to assemble a protocol.